Blog o cestovaní nielen po Japonsku / Travel blog

29. May 2014

28. máj – Nara

EN:Nara is one of the most famous and one of the busiest tourist spots in Japan, its exceptional number of temples and shrines is well-known just as numerous annoying deers which are spawned all around the tourist area. Since I’ve had enough of these creatures on Miyajima island, I wasn’t fascinated with their presence and I tried to ignore them, that is, however, not always possible. As the outside temperature was around +32 degrees (Celsius), the smell from the deers was not really the best thing ever.

EN:Since my visit of Ghibli Studios I always thought that that was the busiest tourist spot in Japan, for being easily accessible from Tokyo and being quite popular abroad. But Nara changed my mind. There were queues of buses waiting for a free parking spot and I mean really long queues – they lined up from the temple district down to the city center of Nara and that wasn’t a short journey. Most of the buses were full of school children and young people who are – I must say unfortunately – sometimes really annoying. Since you are a foreign tourist, they are attracted to you and they want to speak in English, just to practice the language. Now I do understand that this is certainly the best way to practice foreign language, but me being not English native speaker I believe I would not stand as a perfect example, plus, you just want to sit somewhere or rest after a long walk and you are virtually immediately surrounded by children wanting to speak English. Sometimes they just walk towards you, say ‘excuse me’ and then simply run away, having a laugh. I wasn’t the only one who had this experience – I saw many people suffering from the same issue. I am a very friendly and open-minded person, but I believe this is just not right, yes, if you do it once or twice, you don’t mind, it’s actually pretty entertaining, but once this happens every few steps, it becomes quite a burden and you just want to quickly disappear from the area.

Anyway – the biggest advantage of Nara is that most of the unique attractions are one one spot, you can easily walk from one to another. Therefore you don’t have to move around the town, which is great especially in summer days, when the weather is so hot that spending time in public transport would be unbearable. I didn’t visit all the sights in Nara, I hope I will return over there once more in the future, hopefully close future.